Autonomous MySQL database infrastructure for a data company

A data-driven company wishing to transform its outdated MySQL database to a modern highly available architecture with automatic failover.

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Industry Marketing

Technologies MySQL

Datacenters 7

Products ClusterControl

Background

BySide is a leading digital marketing company in Portugal specializing in lead generation for the telco, banking, and retail industry. Their unique analytics platform collects data on user interactions on the web and creates a personalized customer journey profile; allowing for an actionable marketing strategy.

BySide enables its clients to access all the data from a central repository and create personalized marketing campaigns, engagement tools (like surveys & widgets), emails, and other communication types to convert visitors into potential customers.

By accelerating the marketing strategies, BySide minimizes bounce rates and maximizes conversion rates on any website visit. All of this is made possible by BySide’s ability to collate and churn data for analytics — all in real-time.

Challenge

Because BySide is a data-centric company, it relies heavily on its MySQL database. They need to continually generate and deliver millions of data points hourly with high availability and at high speed for their customers. They realized that to continuously fulfill their Service Level Agreements to their users, an immediate review of the current database was required.

“Our MySQL deployments were outdated, not only in one but various geographical locations with no failover mechanisms. The chaos for any failure and disaster recovery was unimaginable,” said João Pereira, Lead Engineer at BySide. “We felt it was too risky to migrate to a clustered deployment on our own so we began the search for an automated database solution to meet our high availability needs.”

BySide wanted an operational system that would not only monitor their databases but manage them as well, offloading several daily tasks of their DBA team. They needed a solution that could fully automate their MySQL operations, including managing backups, failover, and recovery operations.

Solution

The team conducted research on high availability and automatic failover solutions for MySQL. This led them to evaluate clustering solutions like MySQL NDB Cluster, MariaDB Cluster, Percona XtraDB Cluster, and Vitess. They soon realized that the change was going to be difficult and high risk as they did not have specialized knowledge on these stacks. This is when they shifted their focus to a database automation solution.

In the end, they shortlisted two solutions that might work for the failover mechanism — Orchestrator and ClusterControl. ClusterControl was the clear winner in the comparison, as it did much more than just failover.

ClusterControl was perfect. It's easy-to-use, build with a failover mechanism, and supports older versions of MySQL. It's like a database wizard for deploying, managing, and monitoring effortlessly.
João Pereira, Lead Engineer at BySide

Outcome

It took the BySide team only two weeks to move to a production environment after testing and evaluation were completed. ClusterControl was so easy-to-use; letting them perform their entire deployment on their own, without any assistance from the Severalnines support team. João Pereira expressed delight in how ClusterControl managed it all. “ClusterControl works like a charm. We now worry less about our databases and focus more on product development to offer better services for our clients. Since the deployment, sometimes we almost forget ClusterControl is there because it just works. We for sure believe, with ClusterControl, there will be minimal downtime for our customers.”

ClusterControl met the critical needs of BySide:

It was a fully automated database management system with automatic failover capabilities.
It eliminated the need for a full-time DBA.
It provided insight into their databases via the monitoring dashboard, allowing the team to get notified of any irregularities which allow for prompt actions to avoid any downtime.

In addition, ClusterControl’s reporting tools provided operational reports to enhance database performance continuously. With all these excellent features, ClusterControl was the ultimate solution to solve all database problems for BySide.

Summary

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